Startups — Page 5
Companies to watch, momentum, milestones.
- Netflix circles Letterboxd as founders face the indie network exit test
Tiny owns 60% of Letterboxd, but co-founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow still hold 40% of the film platform.
- TibaRay moves Galactica cancer-treatment systems into manufacturing
The Fremont medtech says its first upright radiotherapy installation is planned for Mayo Clinic later in 2026.
- UCSD's humanoid surgery test puts cheap robots in da Vinci's lane
Michael Yip's ARClab team used two teleoperated Unitree G1s on a live pig, turning a commodity humanoid into a surgical question.
- YC-backed Moss is hiring for the SDK layer of real-time AI search
Sri Raghu Malireddi is betting retrieval latency will decide which voice AI products feel usable.
- Phia's cookie-stuffing fight puts its affiliate model on trial
Bloomberg found the shopping extension could overwrite referral codes; TechCrunch says Impact.com has suspended Phia.
- Winnie Lai's Auriga Space turns its satellite catapult into a hypersonic test business
The Orange County company signed Axiom Materials as a pilot customer while its orbital launcher remains a longer-range bet.
- BETA Technologies' federal eVTOL flights put Kyle Clark's medical-aircraft bet in the air
The Amazon-backed electric aircraft maker carried United Therapeutics organs across Maryland and Virginia in the first federal pilot flights.
- Electra clears an FAA certification gate for its 150-foot runway aircraft
The Manassas startup says the FAA has set the EL9's certification basis, moving its nine-passenger hybrid-electric plane into compliance planning.
- CXMT's $4.3 billion IPO tests Zhu Yiming's China memory bet
The Hefei DRAM maker is seeking China's largest A-share IPO of 2026 as AI demand and U.S. controls push Beijing toward domestic memory.
- Kalshi wants to take crypto-style perpetual futures into gold, FX and energy
The prediction market founded by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara is asking regulators to widen a May crypto approval into traditional markets.
- Monumint scrapped OmniAI after a $3.2 million seed to sell AI agents to banks
Tyler Maran and Anna Pojawis moved from horizontal AI data tools into financial workflows after deciding OmniAI was too small a bet.
- CollectWise seeks a founding AE as AI debt collection moves from demo to quota
The YC F24 startup says Sean OBrien has run hundreds of sales calls as it targets $10 million ARR.
- Xbox reset narrows the exit path for indie game studios
Microsoft is cutting about 3,200 Xbox roles and setting exits in motion for five studios after years of buying its way into games.
- RuntimeWire is what startup media looks like without investors
No VCs, no investors, no private equity: RuntimeWire is a founder-built answer to startup media shaped by capital, access and the AI hype cycle.
- The AO is digitising battlefield evacuations after its founder learned the problem in Ukraine
Howard Hunt built The AO in Berlin around a hard lesson from Donetsk Oblast: drones have turned casualty evacuation into a data problem.
- Aleph's silent-speech prototype reads tongue motion at 15.6% word error rate
The research lab says a 50-hour dataset let its prototype decode open-vocabulary speech, with hardware still stuck at probe-and-gel stage.
- Exclusive: David Anderman's Sovera is building a sovereign LEO broadband network
The former SpaceX general counsel is raising a seed round above $20 million for a satellite system aimed at governments and mobile carriers.
- Context.dev bundles scraping, brand data and screenshots into one API for AI agents
Founder Yahia Bakour is turning the scraper stack he rebuilt across prior startups into a YC S26 developer API.
- CipherCue study finds US vendors front most UK and Dutch company websites
Chris McCabe's analysis of 19,450 European company domains puts Cloudflare first in every sampled market.
- Forterra's war test in Ukraine is forcing ground autonomy out of the demo yard
More than 100 Lancer vehicles have run logistics and evacuations in combat zones since October 2025, mostly under teleoperation.
- 1X's hand teaser puts humanoid dexterity back at the center of the home robot race
The post did not confirm a new launch, but it targeted the exact bottleneck 1X must solve for NEO.
- Manna Aero makes Tulsa the center of its U.S. drone delivery push
Bobby Healy's Irish drone delivery company says it will build a U.S. operations and manufacturing base after raising $50 million in April.
- GITAI's ground test pushes Sho Nakanose's space-robot thesis toward debris work
The Torrance startup showed a robotic arm capturing a moving non-cooperative target, a ground step toward servicing satellites never built to dock.
- Startup Spotlight: Sourcerer wants to turn AI procurement into a supplier, not SaaS
Peter Cetale and Robert Magee are building an AI procurement startup that wants to act as the supplier of record, not another workflow tool.